The Chaos Rules
by Empatheia
Summary: -Sora, Roxas x Axel- The librarian at the heart of everything is a completist. Roxas is out of print.


**A/N: **Wrote this ages ago for **ronsard** on LiveJournal, a very dear friend of many years, and somehow forgot to post it here. Probably not terribly canon-compliant, mostly because canon made no sense.

**x.x.x**

_**The Chaos Rules**_

**x.x.x**

Sora finds the door in a dream.

It soars into the shadowed recesses of the ceiling-sky, too vast to fully grasp, something both beyond the capacity of humanity and unmistakeably a human construct. Who else makes doors in the middle of dreamworlds? Who else would care to?

He notices that it is never the same door twice. Every time he blinks it is completely different, and yet there is no question that it is always the same door. First it is dark wood with brass hinges taller than him, carved into curling motifs of battles and mourning gods. Now it is raw stone, hingeless, like a great splintered cliff dripping with dew and last night's rain. Another blink, and it is made of gold, blinding bright but somehow guady and cheap in such enormous quantity.

Around him, the landscape changes as well, but he has never been good at focusing on more than one thing at a time, except in battle. As long as the space around him remains empty he will keep his attention on the door, as it is the strangest thing in a strange land.

"Hello?" he says, not loudly, because he has learned at last that yelling in a strange place is tantamount to alerting every Heartless in its shadow and every Nobody in its invisible corner to his presence and inviting them to shred him to pieces.

Nothing happens.

That is surprising, but only for a moment, because he has been on many adventures and 'nothing' happens rather a lot. There are shades of nothing, he has learned. On one side, the nothing where nothing is ever going to happen, where everything which was going to happen has already done so, a complete absence of tension. On the other, the nothing where something is clearly _meant_ to happen, but a key element has not fallen into place yet. This is the latter kind of nothing, and Sora already knows what's missing.

Here is Sora. There is a door.

The solution is obvious. A blink and a deliberate thought, and his keyblade is in his hand. He raises it, searching fruitlessly for the keyhole, wondering with unusual skepticism if this is even the sort of door which opens. Some don't. But no, the keyblade is reacting, its pale crenellations beginning to glow in the strange sick light of the twisted bone door.

Sora blinks again…

…and the door is an open maw, thick with shadow, a swallowing blue abyss with no floor or far wall.

It looks like a trap.

Forgetting that this is a dream, he turns to run, but the darkness is so much faster than him. It silently billows out and envelops him from behind before he gets farther than ten steps. It smells of dust and static.

Sora falls, and does not wake up.

xxxxx

The heat is unbearable.

Roxas unhappily admits to himself that he miscalculated. Bald Mountain, contrary to his expectation, is not lesser for losing its master. Chernabog's absence has only made it hotter, angrier, more viciously spiteful than it had been under the Lord of Shadows' dark iron hand. The town below it is empty now, grey, drowning in a frozen sea of stone. Its broken surface is littered with grasping bony hands, echoing hollow desperation in a world with no one left to hear it. Occasional trickles of steaming red drift down to touch the edges of petrified buildings in deadly parodies of loving caresses.

Roxas has nearly died twice already, dodging wrathful rains of magma by the virtue of mere inches and a little dumb luck. His skin is red and blistered in most places. He doesn't even _want_ to know what his hair looks like.

But here he is, alive again, his will his own, and below his feet the yawning chasm glows orange in lazy shifting patterns.

The hottest place in all the worlds. The birthplace of flame.

Roxas smiles.

xxxxx

Sora, opening his eyes, understands immediately at least part of what has happened.

He wonders if he's still dreaming. A moment later, he decides he's isn't, but then amends the decision almost immediately when he realizes that he isn't awake either. It doesn't matter. He's been to stranger places than this before. This is just a library, even if it is in a halfway world he's never heard of.

"Good afternoon," says a man Sora assumes to be the librarian, who is sitting across the broad mahogany table from him. He is mousy, eccentrically dressed in long blue robes, but in the depths of his wrinkled face behind the defensive layer of spectacles his eyes are very bright. Before each of them steams a charming cup of what smells like chamomile tea.

"Hi," replies Sora, and then, for lack of a better question: "Where am I?"

The librarian smiles, and tells him.

xxxxx

It takes a long time to set everything up just right. The blue stones have to be exactly this far apart, on exactly these angles, and on the uneven ledge this is difficult to accomplish even without the occasional geyser of steam and lava clumsily leaping for him, looking to boil his blood to mist. The crystals which slot into the tops of the stones have to be woven in complex patterns through the searing, sour air and sung to before completing their respective circles. The bowl of ashes must be kept safe from stray winds until the moment it is emptied over the chasm. He cannot stumble over a single word, even though keeping an even tone is nearly impossible through all the brimstone clogging his throat.

Roxas, however, is good at impossible, and very determined.

The roar of the maelstrom steals the words away from his lips, thinking itself the victor, but Roxas knows better. He is freely giving them away, casting them into the ever-starving mouth of the abyss, these poisonous gifts it is too greedy to refuse.

It will know its mistake soon enough.

xxxxx

Sora knows where he is, and in knowing, also knows where Roxas is; or more accurately where he is not.

He is eighteen now. He does not need _everything_ explained to him anymore. The shape of some things can be determined by the edges of the things surrounding them, and the hole in Sora is Roxas-shaped.

The librarian smiles at him gently, sips his tea, and listens, waits.

Sora has questions.

xxxxx

Once upon a time, an old man told a lie to a young boy, and the young boy believed him. Thus began a tragedy.

Roxas is here because he knows the truth. Sora is in the Library to learn it.

The spell is almost finished.

xxxxx

Sora feels at the walls, opens every door, unwilling or unable to believe without seeing. He runs through endless dim hallways, thick about the sides with old books and drifts of dust, climbs stairs and ladders, peers through every tiny brownish window, and finds only more Library. No edges, no exits, nothing but endless information.

The librarian waits, still smiling, and watches.

Eventually Sora exhausts himself and throws himself back into his chair. His tea is still hot. Oddly, that convinces him more than any of his energetic explorations had managed to.

"Why a library?" he asks.

The librarian nods approvingly, as if Sora has passed some sort of test. "What other form would you have it take?" he asks instead of answering.

Sora thinks. "I dunno," he replies at last. "I guess it does make sense."

The man laughs, a ridiculous snorting giggle that only the very old or the very insane can pull off without concern for appearance. "Of course it does. The record of lives... every sight ever seen, every song ever heard, every memory ever made, they are all here. All," says the librarian, "except for his."

"What about Namine?" Sora asks curiously. "She was the same, why not her?"

"She has already come here, in her own dream before the end," the librarian explains patiently. "Handed her story over to me of her own free will. Remarkable girl. Roxas, however, has had no such chance, no such power over the realms beyond waking."

"Oh. Gotcha."

Finished his tea at last, the librarian stands and wanders about the broad polished marble floor, his long thin robes sweeping faint curving designs in the dust. "The dead come here," he says, spreading his arms wide to encompass the whole of his domain. "Like leaves falling to the earth, this is the center of gravity for all the hearts of all the worlds. Loosed from their branches, they drift through the skies and stars until they inevitably find their way here and land. And I keep them. All of them. Everything they were. But," and he says this sharply, pauses to make sure Sora is listening, "not all they _could_ be. What futures they may have had, they have no longer. They will sleep here forever knowing only their past."

"That's sad," comments Sora, not sure he understands completely but knowing, in the way he sometimes knows things that completely bypasses his brain, that he's right. It is sad. The saddest thing that never was.

xxxxx

Roxas doesn't believe in God, or a Goddess, or any kind of deity beyond the minor powers sometimes found in worlds where magic has been left to simmer and concentrate down into purer and purer forms.

So, when he says the last words of the last incantation, grips the little green crystal bowl in his shaking fingers, and casts the ashes out over the thundering flame, he does not pray.

He hopes. With all of the heart he grew himself.

xxxxx

"And so," says the librarian, "I brought you here for those two reasons. The first is done. We have made significant inroads into the second."

Sora nods. "How's he doing, anyway? Do you know?"

The librarian beams, and waves his hand. A picture forms in the air, hazy as a mirage but vibrantly colourful. Sora sees black stone, red lava, angry clouds of steam-- a volcano. Then he sees Roxas, and the expression on his face as he makes a violent gesture with his left arm, from his chest out into the air. It looks like he's throwing his heart into the fire, except that he doesn't have one.

Suddenly, it's a little hard to breathe. "What's he--" Sora begins to ask, then stops and thinks for a moment instead. It's a measure of how much he's grown up: his younger self, all brilliant impetuousness, had never stopped to think about anything at all if he could help it. Intuition had served him well, to a point, but past that point lay tears and horror and now he knew better. This new, older Sora knows what it is he sees and is namelessly frightened. "Are they… all like that? Or is it just Roxas?"

"Roxas more than any other," answers the librarian, "but they are not what you were told they were, no."

"Yen Sid lied to me." It is a statement, not a question. The edges are all fitting together to explain the shape of what is missing. Sora doesn't want to see but he is too much the hero to run away.

The librarian looks suddenly even older, and inexpressibly sad. "Yes, child. He lied to you. Would you have fought, knowing?"

xxxxx

The ashes spiral away into the blaze and vanish, and for Roxas, the world goes silent.

He holds his breath and waits.

xxxxx

Sora has been silent for nearly twenty minutes.

What he has learned sits in his throat like a stone, immoveable, choking. He feels he could die of it, and wishes-- a cowardly, unheroic wish-- that he'd run away after all, run far out of earshot and hid so those words could never find him.

The past races dizzily through his mind, images and impressions of events and people, and Sora reluctantly admits to himself that sooner or later, he would have been made to realize anyway.

Xemnas and his endless lust for power. Demyx's gentle good humour. Saïx and his berserker rage. Marluxia, cruel and arrogant; Larxene, sadistic, joyful; Luxord, amused, then puzzled. Axel. Oh gods and spirits of all the worlds, Axel, and his desperate adoration for Roxas.

Sora sees them all again, _really_ sees them this time, and thinks _they were people._

Not at first, perhaps, but by the time he met them and made enemies of them and brought them death at the edge of his blade... yes. The truth is stark and glaring and unavoidable: they were people, and he killed them.

For these long years in between he has lived almost happily, nestled in the comfortable belief that he was innocent, good, a hero. That whatever he had done to the Heartless and Nobodies had not been even tangentially related to murder. He had told himself, over and over, bolstered by the kindly words of Yen Sid, that they had been shadows of people, hardly even alive at all.

That may have been true for the first few days, perhaps weeks, of their existence. But only for so long, and never thereafter.

He had thought of hearts and souls like bones, like limbs, like teeth-- once they are shattered, cut off, torn out, they cannot grow back. They are always missing and unlike teeth, a person cannot live without any of them. He had believed that the splitting of heart and body-soul was death, and the leftover halves were mere detritus, echoes of memory and thought that had no real meaning.

Sora knows now, sitting in the depths of Kingdom Hearts itself having tea with the mind it grew itself, that he was wrong.

xxxxx

For the space of thirteen heartbeats, nothing happens.

Then the maelstrom heaves, convulses, and with a shriek like a thousand carrion crows, belches something from its heart into the sullen black sky.

The breath Roxas had been holding in escapes him in a harsh, sobbing gasp.

xxxxx

"Even the names are lies," the librarian tells him. His voice is gentle, but unhesitating-- there is more to the truth, and Sora needs to know it all. "The Heartless, for example, are nothing of the sort. They are what happens when the heart, overcome by the dissonance between what it remembers doing and what it knows to be right, seeks escape from the pain of the dilemma. Pain, you see, cannot be interpreted without the body, or without the soul. It exists but it is meaningless to a heart alone. The heart, by itself, is merely an amalgamation of memory-- the cause for feeling but not the feeling itself-- without any means to understand what either of those things are. All it knows now that it has lobotomized itself is that its existence is wrong, and upon seeing a whole person, understands _how_ it is wrong. Therefore, it goes searching..."

"I get it," interrupts Sora, curled up on his flat wooden chair with his head in his hands and his eyes tightly closed. "I know. They're not Heartless. They're hearts. They find bodies, but those bodies already have hearts, so they look for hearts with cracks in them and dig their fingers in and tear them out to make room for themselves."

The librarian nods. "But the body-soul knows which heart belongs to it and which does not, and rejects the Heartless as it tries to crawl into the newly hollowed space. Confused, the Heartless simply goes to find another body, thinking over and over again _perhaps this time._"

"But some Heartless don't," Sora points out, now a little confused himself.

"No," replies the librarian with a glittering wink. "Some don't. Why do you think that is?"

Sora thinks, and the answer comes with terrible ease. "Power," he says. "The strong ones. They're different."

"Yes, Sora," confirms the librarian. "Close enough, in any case. It is a kind of fourth element, invisible, undefinable, but present in all the others. Ansem, or more accurately, Xehanort—his lust for power was more than a feeling, more than a thought, more than a wish. It was pervasive. It bled into all aspects of his self, and so remained when his self was broken, driving the shards towards that same goal. For you, it was love of your friends, of Kairi. It was your single driving motive in everything you did and was thus inseparable from any part of you."

Sora nods. He has nothing to add. Everything the librarian said strikes so perfectly center that there is no correction necessary.

His chest hurts.

"The heart is what remembers. The body is what feels. The soul is what understands. Without the memories of the heart, the body has nothing to feel _about_, and the soul has nothing to look at. Without body and soul, the heart has nothing to express itself with. The heart is the breath which brings music from the body of the flute, and the soul is what decides the whole is beautiful. Motive is the gravity which keeps them striving to find each other again if they are ever sundered."

The last piece of the puzzle begins to dawn on Sora at last, and he resists the urge to be sick to his stomach.

He is beginning to understand what he is, and through that, what they were, and what they are, and what they could be.

His heart beats wildly against its cage of his chest… the bones and flesh he made himself.

xxxxx

The volcano's gift floats down out of the sky, ash and soot and stone and flame swirling in on themselves, tighter, tighter, until they form a bright, hard-edged _something_. It lands on the ledge at Roxas's feet.

For a long moment, he can only stare rigidly forward, terrified to look down in case he sees something other than what he came here for. The mere thought of failure makes his entire body go rigid in terror.

Then he remembers that though most of the blind courage stayed with Sora, he is hardly a coward, and makes himself look.

From the midst of all the flame and shadow and churning blackness, there are green eyes staring back at him.

xxxxx

"When a person loses their heart," the librarian continues after adjusting his spectacles, "they lose memory, the reason for feeling. However, they do not lose the _ability_ to remember, only the storehouse of what has been remembered already. If a library burns down, do its patrons forget how to read and write? No. They find new books to read, or write their own. It is the same with the heart and the body-soul. If the heart is taken away, the body-soul is still capable of creating new memories, and thus a new heart. And once that new heart begins to grow, it gives the body reason to feel again, and the soul something to understand."

"And the Heartless," Sora continues quietly, uncharacteristically subdued but unable to bluster through this as he has so many things in the past. "They..."

"They can hurt you, yes? Rend your flesh?"

Sora nods, fingers the scars along his forearms.

"That is because the Heartless you meet have already created physical bodies for themselves out of dust and earth. Rudimentary, nerveless, but bodies nevertheless. Given time, the stronger hearts-- those with a greater motive and more energy to devote to it-- can do much better for themselves. Look at yourself. Roxas exists completely separate from you, and yet here you are: clearly corporeal."

"Corpawhatnow?" says Sora, making a face.

The librarian smiles indulgently. "You have a body, Sora. A real one. And a soul, too. You got yours a little differently than most, however. When you cut your heart out, it was messy, imprecise. A substantial bit of soul came with it, and the soul is like a replicating cell in a plant-- after division, each half merely grows itself back to its original size with none of its pattern lost. It is also possible to synthesize soul from the other two elements of self-- Ansem being the most obvious example-- but it is very difficult, and takes a great deal of time."

"So, basically," Sora says slowly, "we're like worms."

The librarian throws his head back and laughs from his belly, rich and echoing. "A great deal more, and more wonderful, I should think," he says, wiping tears of mirth from the corners of his eyes, "but yes. Cut you in half and your halves will learn to live as wholes in their own right. Remarkable. Truly remarkable."

"So Roxas..."

"Roxas," says the librarian, sobering, "is following his heart."

xxxxx

The thing at his feet no longer looks like a fire demon. Its bubbling magma skin has been replaced with soft, pale flesh, and Roxas can see blueish blood vessels running beneath them. Its face is no longer a slab of black, shifting stone. It has arms, legs... now hands and feet, and now a head of red, red hair.

It's not a demon any more. It's an Axel.

The Axel's face splits into a grin, revealing very white, very human teeth. "Necromancy, Roxas?" he rasps, vocal chords still partly made of ash. "_Really?_"

xxxxx

"So what does all this mean for me?" Sora asks after another brief period of silent muddling-through. "Will Roxas come back?"

"Likely not," the librarian muses. "The two of you spent too much time apart to fit back together perfectly. There is more of you now, and more of him, and so together you form something like a person and a half. Since that is too much for one actual person to contain, bits and pieces seem to have been wearing away and falling off, whittling you down to just one, whole person and nothing more. Furthermore, only one mind, one soul, can have dominance at a time. Since that dominant soul is always yours, it seems, Roxas's mind has been the one suffering the greatest amount of wearing-away as your respective edges scrape together and try to find a fit. A little while longer and he would have been gone almost completely."

"Oh," says Sora, finally understanding the overall reason _why_ the librarian brought them here and broke them apart. "I don't suppose Roxas's heart would have made its way back to you."

"Oh, good show!" cries the librarian, clapping his hands. "I was hoping you would figure that out. Yes, you're correct—I was losing a story, the story of Roxas. Those fragments of memory you've been losing are too disparate and weak to come find me. I've gathered some, but it's a very difficult, finicky task, especially fitting them back together after they've been found. They're like individual words on a page-- they have meaning on their own, but very little. Everything depends on finding where they go, which sentence they belong to. So, instead of risking losing the story to guesses and haphazard scotch tape, I gave him room to assemble it himself. I am in no hurry. His heart will come here when he dies, comprehensive and beautifully whole."

"So we're different people now," Sora says, attempting to reduce the librarian's wordy reply down to something he can understand.

The librarian smiles kindly. "You were different people from the moment after you divided," he says, very gently. "The components of self are not stagnant, Sora. They grow and change constantly."

Sora nods, though he's still not sure he fully gets it. "All right, I guess. Just… all right."

For a moment there is peaceful quiet.

Then suddenly the librarian stands, sucking in a great excited breath. He seems to be aware of things beyond Sora's senses, but there is some sort of discernable charge in the air, the weight of an important moment in progress. "Look, Sora!" he cries, waving his arm through the air and conjuring the volcano again.

Sora looks, and sees, and understands.

xxxxx

Roxas opens his mouth to explain that it isn't necromancy, not really, Axel is made of fire and so can't die as long as fire exists and the librarian gave him a spell to gather the little bits of fire that were him back together and make him a person again and it was honestly quite simple, but before he can say a word he realizes that the Axel is naked.

Blushing, Roxas observes pragmatically, makes burned skin feel considerably worse.

"I couldn't," he starts, then stops again because he's not sure what he's trying to say anyway. Then he takes a breath-- not a deep one, he learned that lesson already and has no desire to choke on the air again when his throat is this raw-- and tries one more time. "I'm not Sora," he says.

Axel looks up at him. "Of course you aren't," he says, as if it's the most obvious thing in the world.

Maybe it is.

xxxxx

"His heart is made of different memories," the librarian murmurs. His eyes are suspiciously damp-looking, and Sora thinks perhaps he's really a terrible sap. It's endearing but there's something more pressing on Sora's mind right now.

Sora stares a moment longer at the intense moment playing out in the air, then wins the battle with himself turns away. "Turn it off," he says quietly. "We shouldn't be watching this. It's not ours to see."

The librarian startles, looks at him consideringly, then nods slowly. "Quite right, my boy. Thank you. Sometimes I forget the rules of dealing with the living."

A wave of his hand, and the mirage shimmers out, leaving only the peaceful dim asymmetry of the shelves behind it.

Sora feels both better and worse.

xxxxx

"Sora," Roxas presses on doggedly, "has Kairi and Riku. But I'm not Sora. They aren't mine."

Axel grins. "I think I know where you're going with this."

"Good," Roxas says shortly, "that'll spare me an explanation."

"No, no," Axel says, flailing his brand-new arms a bit to keep Roxas's attention, "I still want to hear you say it. I didn't spend years hanging out in _literal hell_ to come back and have you go all taciturn and stoic on me."

Roxas glowers, but beneath the thin sheen of surface anger there is a swell of joy rising greater than any he has ever been capable of before. "Sora has his friends," he repeats, holding unblinking contact with Axel's sharp green eyes just because he _can_. "I have mine."

Axel is silent for a long moment, just looking at him, _seeing_ him in a way that Roxas knows no one else ever has, Sora included. He stands there and simply sees Axel back, and thinks _yes._

Being one with Sora gave him names for things he had thought nameless, mysteries of the purely human variety. Mysteries like this. And yes, he knows the name for this, for the feeling and the reason he came here both.

Roxas smiles and reaches down to help Axel up.

xxxxx

Worlds away, Sora wakes alone with the taste of chamomile and ashes on his tongue.

**X.x.X**

**A/N:** Yes, I realize the Pagemaster isn't Disney. Bite me.


End file.
